


Pages Left Unturned

by fictorium



Category: West Wing
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-29
Updated: 2010-11-29
Packaged: 2017-10-14 07:17:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/146776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fictorium/pseuds/fictorium
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for <a href="http://community.livejournal.com/ww_pumpkins/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://community.livejournal.com/ww_pumpkins/"><b>ww_pumpkins</b></a> (for <a href="http://soaked-in-stars.livejournal.com/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://soaked-in-stars.livejournal.com/"><b>soaked_in_stars</b></a> )</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pages Left Unturned

There's always a book on the bedside table.

A habit from her childhood, when the book was inevitably one filled with fairytales that she'd lie awake, angry at the endings of. Andrea Wyatt could believe in a lot of things, but the idea that a kiss from a prince could magically solve everything was dubious to her, even at the age of five.

As she got older, and grew so much taller, the singular book became a precarious pile; some with the bookmarks provided on each visit from her favorite aunt, others having their pages hastily marked with scraps of paper or movie ticket stubs. She read like she did everything: as though her life depended on it.

When her father died, the year before Andy left for college, for a while the books became her life. Even the tribulations of Catherine Morland or Dick Diver were preferable to the muffled sounds of her mother sobbing through the bedroom wall.

College, both degrees, left so little time for fiction and poetry, but Andy crammed in what she could. In place of furniture, her dorm room and first shared apartment held stacks upon stacks of books, most of them acquired from thrift stores with cracked spines and well-thumbed pages. Like any adoptive owner, she loved them as though they'd always been hers.

Education brought her love of facts and a good argument to the fore, each non-fiction book another weapon in her arsenal for debates in the classrooms or bars on campus. She danced through Machiavelli and Rousseau, through deTocqueville and Marx, drowning in journal articles that she Xeroxed faithfully every month. Later, when the environment stopped being a fringe issue (and one of the fundamentals of her personal platform) Andy would still feel a pang of guilt at all the paper used in her life; she could never consider it a waste, though.

Words brought her success, both in the debating chamber and her early career. They got her from a law firm to City Council, and one day an arrogant jerk picked a fight with her over her liberal use of the word 'immoral'. He told her to buy a thesaurus, because repetition and redundancy made for forgettable speeches. She pointed out that almost everyone in the Council chambers had been sleeping through her speech anyway, and he said they wouldn't be able to sleep if she gave them a reason to stay awake.

His name, it turned out, was Toby, and her life was never quite the same. They'd drink cheap beer and kiss for hours, before he'd try to attack her notes with a red pen and she'd take the offending ballpoint hostage. He'd spend the night in her bed (the only furniture in her tiny bedroom amidst those ever-growing stacks of books and piles of clothes) and the next day it would begin all over again, through phone calls to her shared office and lunches that were never long enough.

He left for Chicago, to work on some other campaign, and Andy tried not to cry at the thought of never seeing him again. Crying over men was something that belonged to those insipid fairytale heroines she'd despised her whole life, and it only made her angrier as she demolished a box of Kleenex to mop up the unwanted saline.

Letters, unexpected but so very welcome, sustained them through the absence. Toby lost big, vowed never to work in politics again, and came back to Baltimore with a deeper sense of sadness than before. Andy tried to kiss the disappointment away, and she thought it might just have worked when he asked her to marry him.

They were sitting on a bench, eating not-as-good-as-New-York pizza, on a cool Thursday evening. After Andy got done complaining about a vote she couldn't sway, Toby just blurted out "you should marry me," as though it was the kind of thing people just said to one another.

She answered "why?" instead of "yes", and he said "I like the way your hair looks," which was a good enough reason. He told her the rest of the reasons back at her apartment, when they made it as far as the floor in the hall (not the bed) to celebrate their engagement, and Andy knew then that she was loved. She'd been in love since the word "thesaurus" all those months before, but it hadn't seemed polite to say so first.

The story of their marriage, and of how it fell apart in bitter, sarcastic agony, could fill volumes of its own. They lived and loved and hated more in those seven years than most people managed in fifty; maybe that was why it didn't work. Too intense, too fast, too much loving each other like their lives depended on it (they did, for a while).

So she lost the '-Ziegler' from her personal correspondence, but retained the Congresswoman in front of her name when they divorced. Andy flirted and dated and had the fun she was entitled to, but her heart was never in it.

Lying in bed, tonight, with only one lamp lighting the room, she reaches for a book. Tomorrow she has a vote on Farming Reform, but one more policy document about subsidies and Andy knows she'll scream. Ignoring the pile of half-finished books beside her alarm clock, the Allende and the Russo and the Sansom, she lets her hand drift towards the drawer of the nightstand. From it, she retrieves the one book she'll never finish, and flicks through the pages until she finds the poem she was looking for.

It's Toby's book, of course. All she has left of their marriage besides the ring she sometimes forgets to take off. Oh, and the children they're finally having, four years after they stopped trying.

She reads to her stomach most nights, feeling like a fool and as though it's the smartest idea she's ever had all at once. From this battered copy of 'North of Boston' she picks a different poem each night, careful never to have read them all, not ready for the book to be done with. She'll repeat each one over and over, so long as at least one remains for her to discover; there's no telling when she'll be ready for that.

_Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.  
But I am done with apple-picking now._

Perhaps one day they'll be done, but Andy has never quite believed that. He's Toby, and he's part of her life. The vows may be null now, but for better or for worse still manages to apply. She loves him, completely, and that's a tough habit to break.

If he can't be in her bed, because they're better at hurting each other than loving each other, at least there's something of him in these words, in this room. When the children are born, she wants him to read to them, to recite the poetry all locked up in his head. She'll read them parts of his speeches, let them hear his voice when he can't be around to speak himself.

Words will get them through, where actions never could. It might not be conventional, Andy muses, but it's certainly enough.


End file.
